Maharam Icons
Founded in 1902 and rooted in the humble tradition of street sold fabrics on New York’s Lower East Side, Maharam first grew to become a leading supplier of theatre textiles and continued growing to become the leading supplier of textiles for commercial and residential interiors.
- Typeface
- Maharam Neue
- Comissioner
- Maharam, Herman Miller
- Year
- 2020
- Styles
- N/A
- Coverage
- N/A
- Classification
- Icons
- URL
- maharam.com
Dedicated to the pillars of utility, technology, tradition and luxury, Maharam’s reach extends beyond traditional production and supply — with its textiles appearing in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Stedelijk Museum. In 2007, Maharam received the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Patron Award for support of design and cultural initiatives.
Colophon were tasked with creating a custom set of the ISO 3758:2012 fabric care icons for Maharam’s textiles. Using the weight of the Maharam typeface “Maharam Neue”, originally inspired by Renner’s “Futura”, the icon set was designed to sit alongside type in user instruction manuals and other information-driven use cases.
Drawn to fit with the distinct features of “Maharam Neue”, the icon set uses superscript forms directly taken from the typeface and follows the same guiding principles of geometry, contrast and proportion of the parent type.
A final custom drawn set of 41 symbols covering the processes of washing, bleaching, tumble drying, natural drying, ironing and textile care establishes Maharam's larger ethos that utility should never come at the cost of design.
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